Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
O ver the past several decades, the concept of trauma has emerged as a powerful and ubiquitous model for expressing the painful memories and other suffering that arises from exposure to stressful events.As a clinical term, trauma has taken canonical form as the event that gives rise to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Originally, PTSD was conceived as a psychological reaction to horrifying, usually life-threatening experiences, including combat, rape, and life in a concentration camp.Since then, the events deemed capable of producing PTSD have multiplied many times over to include a much wider range of negative incidents.Another notion of trauma, now widely deployed in the media and everyday speech, by rights groups and humanitarian organizations, works by analogy with, but is broader than, the psychiatric concept.In this popular usage, traumas are large-scale tragic events -natural disasters, terrorist attacks, genocide, political repression, and so on -whose effects are viewed not as psychiatric disorders but as wounds in the individual psyche or collective memory of specific groups and peoples.Trauma in this broader sense is a metaphor for collective suffering, a means of representing the past and painful experience as testimony and as grounds for recognition and reparation of victims.An immense literature has been produced on trauma, much of it in the mental health field.Few studies, to my knowledge, explore the psychiatric and the metaphorical meanings in the same study; rarer yet are these notions of trauma investigated by qualitative fieldwork in multiple organizational contexts.That is the extraordinary accomplishment of The Empire of Trauma.Originally published in French in 2007, the book is a powerful social history of the ascendency of trauma as a universalizing moral category, its deployment as a signifier for many different experiences of violence and victimization, and its role as a resource for claiming rights, bearing witness, and authenticating injury.Drawing on research in three cases "emblematic of the contemporary politics of trauma," the authors, both physician-anthropologists, ask probing ques-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".